For Fans of Photographer, a Window of Opportunity

Larry Clark Sells Snapshots for $100 Each

Bryan Leitgeb looks through a crate of Larry Clark snapshots at the Home Alone 2 gallery under the eye of Leo Fitzpatrick, left, the gallery's co-owner.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Larry Clark’s lurid portraits of teenage sex, violence and drug taking hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Now, Mr. Clark, as a kind of thank you to the fans who have made his bleak 1971 photography book, “Tulsa,” and his 1995 movie, “Kids,” cult classics, is offering thousands of his one-of-a-kind color snapshots for purchase at $100 apiece at an East Village art space.

The sale is for people who “come to my shows in thousands and could never afford 10 to 15 thousand dollars for a print,” Mr. Clark, 70, wrote in an email. “This is a payback to all the skate rats and collectors who would like a souvenir, so I can die happy.”

Spread primarily by email, text and word of mouth, news of the sale has brought hundreds of fans to the tiny gallery space Home Alone 2 on Forsyth Street, which is run by his friend Leo Fitzpatrick, an artist who played the nihilistic, H.I.V.-infected teenager Telly in “Kids.”

Drew Wheeler, 21, came back early from a trip to California after hearing about the sale, which runs through Friday, from his photography teacher at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “I flew in at midnight and came here as soon as I woke up,” he said.

Mr. Clark’s work, Mr. Wheeler said, inspired his own interest in photography. After flipping through hundreds of 4-by-6- and 5-by-7-inch prints, stacked willy-nilly in a large wooden crate, he bought four, including one of skateboarders sucking ice pops that reminded Mr. Wheeler of himself and his friends in Santa Monica, Calif.

Max Wolf, 34, said he heard about the sale from a curator at the New Museum. “I’m a big fan of the ‘Kids’ series,” he said. “It meant a lot to people my age.”

Chuck Guarino and his wife, Elisa Maldonado, who own a vintage and leather clothing store near the gallery, stopped in after shopping at Whole Foods.

To Ms. Maldonado, picking through the trove of photographs was like finding a shoebox filled with old snapshots and memories.

Photo

Mr. Clark in 2010.Credit
Francois Mori/Associated Press

Mr. Guarino said: “I first saw ‘Kids’ when I was 18 or 19, and I was blown away. I hadn’t seen any movie like that. It was honest and real.”

“Kids,” with its graphic depictions of cruel and aimless adolescence, was both hailed as a breakthrough and excoriated as exploitation when it was released.

But Mr. Fitzpatrick says there is nothing exploitive about Mr. Clark’s work.

“I’ve never seen an adult have such outward respect for kids,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said of Mr. Clark.

“We sell something very different,” said Natalia Sacasa, the gallery’s senior director. Printed by a commercial printer, the unsigned photographs on Forsyth Street were taken by Mr. Clark over the past few decades while he was working and are “more like artifacts or archival material,” Ms. Sacasa said, “a relic of his life and his experience of the world.”

She did not speculate on what the photos might be worth some day, adding: “Larry is at a point in his life when he wants to connect with his audience. He wants to put something out there that this young demographic can get at.”

Home Alone 2, founded by Mr. Fitzpatrick and the artist Nate Lowman, is not a business. “We don’t sell art, so this show is a big pain,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was wearing camouflage overalls and a knitted hat and apologizing for the disordered piles of photos, which are stamped on the back as Mr. Clark’s work.

“We consider it like a public service,” he explained. “New York is getting so overpriced, no one can afford to do creative things anymore.” Mr. Fitzpatrick, who first met Mr. Clark more than 20 years ago when he was 14, considers him something of a surrogate father.

After undergoing surgery last year — which Mr. Clark described in his email as “a near-death experience” — he told Mr. Fitzpatrick that he wanted to sell off the storehouse of prints he had in his New York loft.

Contrasting Mr. Clark’s crateful of photographs with carefully chosen and presented art shows, Mr. Fitzpatrick said the Forsyth Street event was meant to be anti-elitist. “We just wanted to make art fun again,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2014, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: For Fans of Photographer, a Window of Opportunity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe